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Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

simperium.com

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Re: Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

#51

Post by cloudmike »

onetwothreefour wrote: post #47
dtran wrote: post #18

"With Simperium, you own your data - that's important!" Not to take away from some of the great projects featured on HN recently, but statements by Simperium like this make me much happier as a developer and business owner: "We believe the best apps have both a great user experience and unique backend services." . From https://simperium.com/overview/ : It is not a backend-as-a-service. We believe the best apps have b…

This is definitely a cool and interesting service, sure, but how exactly do you "own your data"? It's sitting in Simperium's database and you're locked into their platform once you decide to use it. Maybe there's an export, but that's irrelevant because all your apps in the wild and all your users are relying on this service to move data around. If Simperium gets hacked, you get hacked. If Simperium goes down, you go…

You own your data in the sense that, unlike services like iCloud, you can mirror all your user accounts and data to your own backend database that you control.

This extra degree of control, though not absolute, lets you develop your own solution (or integrate someone else's) in parallel should you stop using Simperium.

Our libraries are designed to have a small footprint; they're easy to both add and remove. And we plan to open source them in the future.

Beyond that, you cite valid concerns for any service.

Re: Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

#52

Post by saurik »

zmmmmm wrote: post #40
cloudmike wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We agree Android is important, but we found enough developers who thought iOS/OSX, JavaScript and Python were sufficiently compelling, so we focused on those for launch. Releasing more libraries is a priority.

What I find really odd is that you have no statement of such on your web page. I search the entire thing and I can't tell if you ever plan to release an Android library. As a developer it shapes my perception of you as not a cross platform play but an iOS play and immediately rules you out for just about anything I would do. If I was you I would at very least have a note in your libraries section that Android is on y…

I generally presume that any project has all kinds of things on their agenda, and that they don't need to explicitly state all of them. I often find users e-mailing me asking me "do you intend to do X", and I find myself wanting to reply "do you really consider me so closed minded as to not want to do X? I just haven't done it yet". What really matters is what is already done and what can be relied on: even if they said "we intend to build an Android library" on their site, it doesn't necessarily mean that they will ever get around to it (or that they won't decide it is even a bad idea, not that I think that would happen in this case).

Re: Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

#53

Post by kt9 »

Void_ wrote: post #10

This one is the best so far: 1. Works with any JavaScript library 2. You can write server-side logic 3. Operational Transformation baked in Seriously I cannot find anything bad about this project. (I really wanted to.) My questions: 1. Is the server side written in Python? 2. Is there offline support for JavaScript apps too? (I tried this with my own library and I think it was a wrong direction -- it only made it mor…

I missed the part about writing server side logic. How does this service allow you to write service side logic?

Re: Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

#54

Post by ecksor »

gmaster1440 wrote: post #31
ecksor wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes definitely, you can update directly using the bucket.update() method, and pass in an id and the data object. The better way would be to implement the 'local' callback to return the data, then just call bucket.update(id), and the library will call your 'local' method to retrieve the current state for that id. You can read about the 'local' callback here: https://simperium.com/docs/reference/js/#local For auth, we'…

perfect, thanks!

We just added support for CORS on both /authorize/ and /create/, let us know if you have any issues

Re: Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

#57

Post by equark »

tarr11 wrote: post #35
equark wrote: post #15

We desperately need a high quality open-source Firebase/Simperium/Spire. A simple, robust, realtime data synchronization layer with libraries for major platforms. These projects all look great, but outsourcing this infrastructure is simply not feasible for lots of projects.

Are there any operational transform libs that are transport independant? Socket.io and socketstrwam can handle communication.

ShareJS is a good example. However I don't think this is the right approach necessarily. The FireBase API is a lot simpler and in casual tests it's much faster too.

Re: Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

#58

Post by fufulabs »

brianr wrote: post #27
cloudmike wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Brian, we know this is really important. Our beta label is mostly for the lack of pricing since the technology itself is production-ready. We're looking for more feedback and we aim to announce pricing soon. What do you think about Urban Airship's model based on active monthly users? What we like is that the costs are obvious and map clearly to your business.

MAU doesn't seem like a good model to me; it's not very well connected to your costs or customers' usage so it creates weird incentives on both sides. And it makes it expensive for an existing product with a large userbase to try out a small simperium-based feature. You guys are a hosting/infrastructure service, and it's probably for good reason that such services have historically charged based on usage. For you tha…

backing this up. We like the Parse pricing model so anything to improve that would be better :)

Re: Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

#60

Post by ecksor »

kt9 wrote: post #53
Void_ wrote: post #10

This one is the best so far: 1. Works with any JavaScript library 2. You can write server-side logic 3. Operational Transformation baked in Seriously I cannot find anything bad about this project. (I really wanted to.) My questions: 1. Is the server side written in Python? 2. Is there offline support for JavaScript apps too? (I tried this with my own library and I think it was a wrong direction -- it only made it mor…

I missed the part about writing server side logic. How does this service allow you to write service side logic?

We provide endpoints for you to monitor all changes across all users - using this you can run a service that could validate each piece of data as it is changed, making updates if necessary, or do things like mirror the entire datastore.
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